MAGNET Exclusive: Patterson Hood Goes Track By Track On “Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams”

It’s interesting that Patterson Hood has released Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams (ATO) just a few months prior to David Lowery’s 28-song Fathers, Sons And Brothers, which is due May 30. Both are heavily autobiographical, self-depreciatingly honest solo albums loaded with juicy, sometimes off-color anecdotes. Before moving to Portland, Ore., in 2015, the Drive-By Truckers frontman was a lecturer at University Of Georgia, where Lowery is now part of the faculty. In the not-too-distant past, perhaps the two chatted about all this memoirish stuff in the teacher’s lounge at some point. Who knows?

Whatever the case, Hood walks us through his first solo album in more than a decade.

—Hobart Rowland

1) “Exploding Trees”
“The album kicks off with a tale of a natural disaster that occurred in my hometown of Florence, Ala., in the winter of 1994, a few weeks before I moved to Athens, Ga. Days of heavy rain had soaked everything, and a sudden sharp drop in temperature caused the trees—especially the pine trees—to essentially explode. All over town, literally thousands of trees hit cars, houses and people. It was on CNN, and the area was declared a disaster zone. A friend of mine was severely injured when her car was crushed, with her in the driver’s seat, by a huge fallen oak tree. It was a meteorological event that prefaced my moving away to begin what became ‘the rest of my life’—and it provides an entryway into this chronological reverse deep-dive into an album filled with tales and vignettes about my youth and coming of age. I finished writing the song on piano, an instrument I’m barely adequate at. I’d originally planned to get an actual piano player to perform it on the album, but my friend and producer Chris Funk informed me that he wanted me to play it—and that I’d better start practicing. He said he wanted me out of my comfort zone. He succeeded there.”

2) “A Werewolf And A Girl”
“My high-school girlfriend was my first love and a very formative influence on my later life. We dated for a year, breaking up badly right before graduation. Years later, we became friends again. This song juxtaposes our initial falling in love with the breakup, much in the style of the film Blue Valentine. I wrote it from both of our points of view. Lydia Loveless sang the female part and knocked it out of the park. Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) played baritone sax. I wrote the song—lyrics first, which I rarely do—back in 2021. I wrote the music in the studio on the day it was recorded. Besides Blue Valentine, the song was influenced by the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush duet ‘Don’t Give Up,’ the Rolling Stones’ ‘Worried About You’ and the film An American Werewolf In London, which was a big favorite when I was 17.”

3) “The Forks Of Cypress”
“This a real place a few miles north of my hometown. A former plantation house once owned by a cousin of Andrew Jackson, it was struck by a ‘lightning cluster’ in 1966—when I was two—and exploded into flames, burning to the ground in under five minutes. All that was left were these huge columns in a rectangle on top of a hill overlooking the meadow. It was right by a very creepy, rickety one-lane bridge that the locals called Ghost Bridge. I drove past this—and crossed the scary bridge—every week of my childhood on my way to my great-uncle’s house, where I spent every weekend. Later, as a teenager, kids would drive dates out to the bridge, tell ghost stories and make out. The bridge was torn down about a decade ago. I wrote the song as pure fiction, inspired by those great story songs Bobbie Gentry did, where she implies a story without explicitly telling it. In my head, I heard Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) singing it with me and was blessed that she was willing to do so. She’s one of my very favorite artists and such a lovely person. Kevin Morby put the cherry on top with a stunning lead part.”

4) “Miss Coldiron’s Oldsmobile”
“Anne, my godmother from my childhood, lived alone across the street from my grandmother. She never married, and although she’d inherited some money, she lost power of attorney due to some mental issues she had.  Whenever she asked for more money, she was gaslit and left wanting. I spent a good bit of my childhood riding in the back of Anne’s giant Oldsmobile Delta 88. They’d let me pan the radio to just the back speakers and listen to rock ’n’ roll songs while they ran errands. I vividly remember hearing ‘I’ll Take You There,’ ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ for the first time in the back of that car. Stuart Bogie added the layers of bass clarinet.”

5) “The Pool House”
“I spent a night at this creepy place—a literal pool house in an apartment complex I rented cheaply for the night during a solo tour. It was off-season, and the pool was dark green and filled with algae. I’d had a couple of drinks, and my mind was wandering, conjuring up some macabre shit. I wrote most of it during lockdown and demoed it on my home rig. I later recorded it with Nate Query (Decemberists) playing upright bass and Dan Hunt (Neko Case) on drums. I played piano, guitar, vocals and a trashcan as percussion on the bridge. Then I had Kyleen King work her magic, adding viola and layers of strings from her own arrangement. The great Steve Berlin played flute, which he knocked out of the park. He’d come by the studio to put some sax parts on other songs, and I mentioned wanting a flute for this track. He asked what kind of flute part I was thinking of, and I said, ‘Something like what Chris Wood would play in Traffic.’ He just smiled and said he’d see what he could do. Frances Thrasher, who painted the album cover, also created the incredible and creepy stop-motion animation for the super-cool video using a vintage dollhouse.”

6) “The Van Pelt Parties”
“Another slice of my weird childhood. Wendy Van Pelt was my babysitter as a child. She appears for a second in the film Gimme Shelter as the Rolling Stones were leaving the Holiday Inn in my hometown to go record ‘Wild Horses’ at my dad’s studio. Her and her parents became close friends with my parents. Every year, they had a big party on Christmas Eve. As my parents were younger than everyone else there, I was the only kid in attendance. As I got older, I learned how to raid the punchbowl, providing some of my earliest alcohol-related experiences. It’s probably the most ‘rocking’ song on the album. Members of the band Wednesday play on it—they’re one of my very favorite bands right now. I got to see them at the 40 Watt as an early birthday present, and they came to the studio early the next morning before driving to another show, and they made it happen. Karly Hartzman sang harmony, and MJ Lenderman and Xandy Chelmis provided a wonderful tangle of electric guitar and pedal steel. David Barbe had already laid down a killer bass part to the basic track I’d recorded with drummer Dan Hunt.”

7) “Last Hope”
“This was the last thing I wrote for the album, completing it after most of the album was already recorded. I wrote it on piano, and it’s based loosely on an older song with the same title that I’d never been able to make work. As I was writing it, I didn’t really have an agenda or any particular deeper meaning intended, but it occurred to me afterward that it could be about the Dimmer Twins, as there somehow seems to be a bit of (Drive-By Truckers cofounder Mike) Cooley and me in it—or maybe just the way that Wes Freed drew us for posters, where we favored Butch and Sundance jumping off the cliff. It even name-drops ‘the Coug’—so there’s that. I recorded the basic track at David Barbe’s Chase Park Transduction in Athens the same day Wednesday came to record their parts for ‘The Van Pelt Parties.’ I played David’s grand piano, which used to be his father’s. Brad Morgan played the drums. Jay Gonzalez played something called a Crumar Performer (keyboard) on it. Chris Funk later added a Bass VI and an OP-1 (synth). Steve Berlin added baritone sax.”

8) “At Safe Distance”
“Inspired by Harper Lee, I wrote this a couple of weeks after our family relocated to Portland in 2015. To Kill A Mockingbird had always been one of my all-time favorite books, with Atticus Finch’s nobility in the face of Jim Crow horrors making him an idyllic hero to an Alabama white kid like myself. In 2015, not long before Ms. Lee’s passing, she published her long-awaited Go Set A Watchman, a sort of companion piece to her earlier masterpiece. In it, Atticus Finch is a more complicated character. My initial reaction to the reviews of Go Set A Watchman was shock and sorrow, followed by a more reflective realization that this more complicated view of him might, in itself, offer a more realistic portrayal of our region’s (and nation’s) relationship with race and racism. I wrote ‘At Safe Distance’ during the same period I was writing songs for (Drive-By Truckers’ 2016 album) American Band, with its reflections on race and politics. Thematically, it fit well with those songs. But musically, it seemed to call for a different approach—one that took me the better part of a decade to find.”

9) “Airplane Screams”
“I wrote this more than 40 years ago, in August of 1984, when I was 20 years old. It was inspired by a conversation with someone I had a couple of dates with at the time—a troubled friend of great beauty and sadness. It’s a song I’ve always held in high esteem but never quite had the right place to put it. Adam’s House Cat worked up a version of it in 1991, shortly before we ended, but we never played it live. Nearly a decade later, Drive-By Truckers recorded a version of it as a placeholder on an earlier version of Southern Rock Opera before correctly deeming it not right for that project. I recorded a solo version for a benefit record for the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2017. I’d originally planned to use that version on the album, but the new tracks sounded so great that we decided to re-record it with Chris Funk playing synthesizer and piano, Nate Query on bass and Dan Hunt on drums. I played electric and acoustic guitars and piano and sang lead and harmony vocals. Kyleen King based the viola part on her original but topped it with additional viola, violin and a wonderful harmony vocal. It’s the third oldest song of mine I’ve ever recorded—and it will probably remain as such. I love how well a 40-year-old song fits into my newest album.”

10) “Pinocchio”
“As a child, my first obsession was probably my dad’s Beatles records, followed closely by a full-on deep dive into all things having to do with Walt Disney’s 1940 film Pinocchio, which was re-released in theaters the summer I was seven, right after first grade. In those days, before video, film rentals or streaming, seeing a movie multiple times involved convincing an adult to take you. I was fortunate to talk my grandmother (Sissy) and great-uncle (George A.) into taking me probably eight to 10 times. I memorized every line and frame, and I’d act it out in my grandmother’s backyard for the kids in her neighborhood. They were not impressed. This might be the most personal of any song I’ve ever written—personal in ways that have become clearer to me in the years since I wrote it. By unlocking such a personal and all-consuming obsession, I’ve managed to answer many of my own questions about my childhood and the many years that followed. As a parent, one of the fringe benefits is applying my children’s various diagnoses to my own symptoms. I was raised in a different time, culturally and otherwise. ADHD, autism and sensory issues weren’t widely diagnosed in North Alabama in the 1970s. I was bullied mercilessly at school and often punished for my bad grades at home. I was always an obsessive personality, and my various untreated and undiagnosed issues greatly affected my life. All three of these possible diagnoses made my life as a kid a hell—but they’ve often become somewhat of a superpower in my chosen profession and adult life.”